At the beginning of the year, I began a new artwork called Listener, which developed from my research and conversations at AbTeC. Listener was premiered at SAW VideoKnot project space / espace projet Nœud in Ottawa, Ontario, and performed at Concordia as an Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents event. I am most proud of having performed and installed Listener at Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota to an audience of Lakota friends and family. Later in the year, I performed Listener at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria and at 24 Hour Drone Hudson Basilica in New York. Since then a video version of Listener was screened at Echo Park Film Center in LA as a part of Art at Tongva. Listener was also installed as a video in the “Live Long and Prosper” exhibition at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

I made a second new work called Better Off Alone, an installation and internet chat room, where the typing of the audience is sonified into drum n bass. This piece was installed at InterAccess in Toronto, curated by former AbTeC RA Lindsay Nixon. I closed out the installation with a performance of a work addressing imagined and real space through jungle sample sounds in a piece titled, junglejungle at InterAccess.

I collaborated extensively last year with Nathan Young, who came to Montreal as an artist-in-residence at the Indigenous Futures Cluster, resulting in a completely new project called something is coming. In the fall, Nathan and I participated in a residency at the M:ST Performative Art Festival in Calgary, where we created and performed 12 new sound works for the project, all focusing on sonifying the electricity grid.

Finally, my research into American mythologies of Indians and aliens was published by Un Projects, titled “Who Believes in Indians”. The research into Lakota ontology and Lakota concepts of nonhuman animacy, which I first lectured about at the Zooetics Symposium talk and panel at MIT, was then published in collaboration with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis as “Making Kin with the Machines” published in MIT Journal of Design and Science. In a similar vein, I am now the Coordinator for the upcoming Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence workshops!

2018 was a super productive year, and I am glad for my role as an RA for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures.